


arasuum'la (unchanging, stagnant)

by oflgtfol



Series: if love is the answer, you're home [1]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Din Djarin Needs a Hug, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mandalorian Culture (Star Wars), Nightmares, Post-Episode: s02e08 The Rescue, Religious Guilt, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, all his friends know he's fucked up rn and are just trying to help him thru it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 23:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29741727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oflgtfol/pseuds/oflgtfol
Summary: Din finds his son. The Jedi arrives. Din says goodbye to his son.(He did the right thing. So why does it hurt so bad?)
Relationships: Din Djarin & Boba Fett, Din Djarin & Boba Fett & Fennec Shand, Din Djarin & Cara Dune, Din Djarin & Fennec Shand, Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda
Series: if love is the answer, you're home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2184417
Comments: 7
Kudos: 63





	arasuum'la (unchanging, stagnant)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The Mandalorian is the only Star Wars content I've ever consumed, sorry for any subsequent weirdness <3
> 
> Mando'a translations are included at the end, but should hopefully be understood by context clues!

The doors close.

For a moment, all Din can do is stand there. The sight of big brown eyes staring into his own is burned into his retinas, leaving an afterimage that haunts him even after the kid is long gone. His heart pounds, slowly but hard enough that it rattles in his chest, in his throat. He feels like a piece of him is missing and is steadily being pulled further and further away with the child.

Someone coughs behind him.

And suddenly, he's painfully aware of how quiet it is on the bridge, and - his neck prickles with the weight of four separate people gaping at the back of his head. His bare head. Right. That - that's an issue he'll unpack, later.

He bends down and picks his helmet back up. The hard metal is cold and unyielding under his hands. The T-visor stares back at him, impassive.

Din knows he's lost his right to Mandalorian identity - the cool air brushing against his cheek is an unwelcome reminder of it. But he's also just lost his son again ( _maybe for real, this time_ ), and his ship was destroyed, and he hasn't seen his tribe in nearly a year. He has nothing, and the idea of turning around, exposing his face for everyone to see, losing yet another part of himself... He doesn't think he can.

And so, selfishly, he brings the helmet up and over his head. It hangs awkwardly, out of place like it no longer fits him. His hands shake as he fumbles with the pressure valves, and it takes an uncomfortably long time to close the hatches once more. The press of beskar against his scalp is heavy in a way it normally never is.

( _Dar’manda_ , his mind whispers, and it almost sounds like the voices of his tribe.)

Din turns around and finally meets the others’ eyes. Thankfully, protected by an opaque visor and a dome of silver. The only face of his they have ever known.

"I'll call Fett to come pick us up, then," Shand speaks up, breaking the silence. She looks around the room, gaze darting around to each person before she steps to the side and opens her comm.

The air is still thick with tension as Cara starts making her way across the bridge towards him. He watches her approach, feeling detached in a way that doesn’t dissipate even when she reaches out and squeezes his arm.

“Are you alright?” She asks, voice low and steady. Like how he spoke just ten minutes ago, when the kid was unresponsive and cold in his arms after _ka’ra_ know what Gideon had done to him. And it feels like there’s a gaping hole in his chest, right under his _Kar’ta Beskar_.

"I don't know," Din replies. His voice sounds distant to his own ears. "I- the kid- Grogu —" Something rises in him, choking him off, and she pulls him into a hug. He doesn't - _can't_ \- lift his arms, body bruised and exhausted, empty and surrounded by that all-encompassing sense of loss. He stands still and stiff in her embrace.

He can feel Kryze scrutinizing them from across the room, visible just over the edge of Cara's head with Reeves by her side. Her brows are furrowed, mouth downturned in a scowl, and her gaze is downright venomous.

And suddenly the emptiness inside him fades away, replaced by bitter frustration and dark resentment. Din draws away from Cara. Her arms fall away from him, and she turns to him with concern. He doesn’t look back, keeping his visor pointed straight ahead as he walks over to Kryze. He fumbles for the Darksaber at his waist, but his strides are purposeful. This is the only thing he's certain about right now.

Din holds the saber hilt out to her. "Take it. Just fucking take it, already."

Reeves steps forward, drawing his attention away from Kryze. “Weren’t you listening?” She sneers. “You can’t just hand it over. It can only be won in battle.”

“So fight me then,” he says simply. He’ll lose, but the power he stumbled into will be out of his hands, and he wants nothing more at the moment.

Kryze scoffs from behind Reeves, who slinks back to her side.

“Please. You’re in no condition to fight,” Kryze says. She tilts her head so that she can look down on him. “It would not be a fair victory on my part. I must win it _properly._ "

“Not that _you_ would know anything about that,” Reeves adds.

“ _Haar’chak_ ,” Din spits out. “I don’t want this thing. I don’t care about Mandalore, I don’t care about politics, I just want -” His voice cracks, and he immediately cuts himself off. Kryze is not someone he will bare his soul to.

She shakes her head and turns away from him. “Absolutely no respect for our culture. Surprising for a zealot such as yourself.” Her voice is full of scorn. Without thinking, he finds himself moving forward, grip tightening around the saber - but hands catch him around his shoulders, holding him back. 

“Fett’s here,” Shand interrupts from across the room. She eyes them warily. “We shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

The hands on his back push him towards the elevator doors, and the weight is familiar enough that he can tell it’s Cara. Din lets himself be moved, but he doesn’t look away from Kryze where she stands at the center of the bridge. Even through his visor, her glare manages to meet his eyes.

“Don’t worry, _vod_ ,” she says with a tight-lipped smile. Her words are light, but Din can detect the undercurrent of rage. “You won’t have it for long. I’ll be coming for it soon.”

* * *

“Where’s the kid?” Fett asks as soon as they board _Slave I_.

Din leans against the weapons locker and crosses his arms to hide his shaky hands. Dimly, he notes that the only thing keeping him from collapsing is the steady strength of his armor. He stares at the floor instead of responding, and neither Cara nor Shand give an explanation either. Out of the corner of his visor, he spots Shand shaking her head at Fett.

There's some shuffling, some discussion, and then the two women and the unconscious Moff are gone. Fett stands across from Din, helmet tilted in such a way that Din recognizes he’s being watched. 

"You look like shit, _beroya._

"... Yeah," Din replies. His throat is tight, closed up, and he barely manages to get the word out. He feels his grip on reality loosening. The adrenaline is fading, the shock is wearing off, and the heavy realization of what just happened is settling in. His limbs are weak, trembling, and he turns away so that he doesn't have to see Fett's blank visor looking back.

Time passes. Minutes, hours, Din can’t tell. Distantly, he hears shuffling and quiet conversation in the background, but he can’t seem to focus on any details. It merely washes over him, indistinct and hazy, until a hand on the edge of his vambrace rouses him back to attention. He looks over to see Cara standing nearby. The rest of the hold is empty.

She offers him a small smile, tight with concern. "Fett wants us in the cockpit," she says. Din gives her a jerky nod. Her hand drifts down to his, and she leads him forward.

Fett’s sitting in the pilot seat when they step through the doors. Shand is next to him, pressing enough buttons on the dashboard that it makes Din dizzy trying to keep up. The viewscreen flickers to life as the nav system boots up.

Fett swivels around in his chair to face them. “We’ll bring you to wherever you need to go. Any destinations in mind?”

"You can drop me and Gideon off on Nevarro,” Cara replies. She turns to Din. Her eyes flit across his visor, as though she’s searching for his eyes, and she squeezes his hand. “You’re always welcome back if you need somewhere to stay.”

His heart skips a beat. He clenches his free hand into a fist, thinking of that damn planet. Where he had picked up Grogu's puck. Where he'd nearly lost the kid too many times to count.

( _The child crying out as the doctor led him away, the heat of blaster fire as the Guild turned on them. His heart in his throat when Kuiil wouldn't answer the comm. The pile of Mandalorian helmets._ )

He thinks of Greef, how the man had warmed up to the child over time. How he would ask to hold Grogu and offer to bring him to the school again even though the kid’s too young for it to be of any use. The inevitable disappointment on his face when Din tells him what happened today.

But he has nowhere else to go, does he? No ship, no covert, no son. Nothing.

Din shakes his head and remains silent.

Fett clears his throat. “We’ll set a course to Nevarro, then. ETA seven hours.”

* * *

Cara tugs his hand and leads him out of the cockpit, back towards the hold. Behind them, Din hears Fett and Shand’s quiet conversation. The words blend together and become more muffled as Cara brings him deeper into the ship. She holds him with a certain gentleness, like he’s made of glass and about to shatter at any moment. Normally he’d chafe at it, assert that he’s _fine._ But now, he can barely muster the energy to walk, nevermind pretend to be okay.

(Because he certainly isn’t okay, he’s realizing. Cara must’ve known from the start.)

She sets him down on the floor so he’s leaning against one of the lockers and sits down next to him with a huff of breath. She grabs his hand again and slots her fingers between his, ignoring the stiffness of his gloves. Her arm presses against his side. The touch is grounding.

“You did what you had to,” she tells him. “He’s with his own kind, now. That Jedi, that was Luke Skywalker. He was with the Rebellion, helped take down the Empire. Your boy is safe with him. You did the right thing.”

Din doesn’t respond, but the tightness in his chest loosens, just a little bit. He sucks in a trembling breath, barely audible through his modulator. He did the right thing. Grogu is safe. His son has a better life now. _He did the right thing_.

A tear slips down his cheek, and then another follows, and suddenly the pressure that had been building in his chest, in his throat, behind his eyes, collapses inward. A wounded noise rips out of him, and the tears don’t stop coming. The neck of his flight suit gets wet. The inside of his helmet is drenched. He can’t breathe and he feels like he’s drowning. He feels so horrifically seen, as though he never put his helmet back on at all. It doesn’t matter that she can’t see his eyes, because the way his shoulders shake and his hand clings to hers reveals everything in the end.

Cara’s presence suddenly feels claustrophobic. The helmet over his head is smothering. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t push her away, doesn’t remove his _buy’ce_. Just sits there and lets himself suffocate as the sobs wrack his frame.

* * *

As the interior lights dim to mimic nighttime, Din lies on the floor of the cargo hold with every piece of beskar still on his body, and his helmet solidly stuck to his head.

Din hasn’t taken it off. Even as the tears dry and stick to his face and the inside of his helmet, even when his heart flutters and his vision tunnels and he finds it hard to breathe past the tightness in his chest, he keeps it on.

He knows that doesn’t have the right to wear it. He took it off in front of other living beings - not even once, but _twice_. He broke the Creed _twice_. The members of his covert would take one look at him and know he is _dar’manda_ , without him even uttering a word. It’s written across him, now - inscribed in the hunch of his shoulders, the downward tilt of his visor.

And yet, something stops him from removing it, from accepting his status as _dar'manda._

The idea of taking it off, of showing everyone onboard his face, makes the pain between his ribs claw even harder, makes his heart race and his stomach roll with nausea. It’s selfish, and it only solidifies the fact that he’s no longer Mandalorian. A true _Mando’ad_ would submit to their fate with grace, would never put their _buy’ce_ back on. But he had. He had, and he hates himself for it, but he still can’t bring himself to take it off again.

Staring up at the dark ceiling, Din can’t manage to fall asleep.

He feels the gear shift knob digging into the back of his thigh from where it rests in his pocket. The pain is dull but brings clarity, and he keeps his mind carefully blank for the rest of the night.

* * *

“Look alive!” Fett’s voice is muffled from the cockpit, but loud enough to bring Din back to attention. “We’re arriving at Nevarro in ten minutes. Dropping out of hyperspace in sixty seconds.”

Din’s eyes burn against the daytime lights. He doesn’t remember when they came on. He hadn’t been asleep, but he hadn’t been _awake_ either - he’d been in some sort of strange, untethered form of semi-consciousness, and seven hours had passed without his knowledge.

(He hadn’t slept in _ka’ra_ know how long. Not since Tython, he thinks. Not since he had Grogu in the small hammock above his head, snoring softly.)

He straightens up and tries to get his bearings together. His vision swims and he feels light-headed, temples pounding with a growing headache. Every muscle in his body feels weak. An odd sickly sensation worms its way through his chest.

The ship jolts as it enters realspace again, and Din would have fallen back to the floor were it not for a hand grabbing his bicep. He tenses at the sudden intrusion and turns to see Cara kneeling next to him, watching him nervously.

“I need to go unfreeze Gideon for transport,” she says slowly. “Will you be okay?”

“Yes.” His voice is rough, and he gives her a curt nod to try and cover it up. She sends him an uncertain look before she dips around a corner that he hadn’t noticed. He lets out a sigh and slumps against the locker behind him.

Their arrival to Nevarro is coming up fast, and he still doesn’t know what to do. For so long, he’d taken life day by day, bounty by bounty, only planning for the short-term. His quest to find a Jedi for Grogu had been his longest mission yet - and now it’s complete. He doesn’t know what to do with himself now that it’s over.

He did what he was tasked to do. The child is gone. And Din feels emptier than ever.

All too soon, Cara comes back, pushing the handcuffed Moff into the hold in front of her. The man looks disheveled, likely still reeling from his extended stay in the carbonite freezer. But his gaze lands on Din anyway, and his face lights up with a delighted smirk when he finds the Darksaber still clipped to Din’s belt.

“ _Su cuy’gar,_ Din Djarin,” Gideon greets smoothly, belying his unkempt state. The Mando’a is foreign in his mouth, and the sound of his name makes Din’s skin crawl.

“Hey, you,” Cara pokes the barrel of her blaster in his back. “Shut your mouth. Mando’s off-limits.” She pushes him forward and forces him to sit on a crate in the middle of the room. Din keeps his visor straight and watches out of the corner of his eye.

“Dune, we need you up here for landing,” Shand’s voice calls from the cockpit.

Cara sighs. “Right now?” But she turns to Din anyway, mouth downturned with worry, and he nods to her silent question. Her shoulders slump with relief.

“I won’t be long,” she promises. She ascends to the cockpit with one last glance over her shoulder.

The hold is blissfully quiet for a minute, until -

”Something wrong, _Mand’alor_?” Gideon says. Even handcuffed and defeated as he is, he still acts like he has the upper hand. Din looks away and doesn’t respond.

“Where’s the Child, hm?” He continues. “All of that, and you still didn’t get the creature?”

“He’s not a _creature,_ ” Din spits out without thinking, jerking his head back over to face him.

“Ah, it seems I’ve hit a nerve,” Gideon drawls, unimpressed. “Well, what is it then? Your _son_? Please.” He lets out a dark chuckle. Din clenches his fists and remains silent. “Forgive me, _Mand'alorm_ but your _son’s_ absence doesn’t endear me to your parenting skills.”

“Don’t call me that,” Din growls. “I’m not the _Mand'alor._ ” He ignores the dig at his parenting, ignores the way his stomach drops and the vice around his heart constricts. He knows he shouldn’t rise to the bait, shouldn’t be engaging at all, but everything feels off-kilter right now, like he isn’t in control.

_You did the right thing,_ he repeats Cara’s words in his mind. _You did the right thing._

“Yet you’re still in possession of the Darksaber,” Gideon remarks. “Funny how you’ve lost it all, in exchange for a title you don’t even want.”

He says something else, but Din stares straight ahead and tunes him out for the rest of the trip.

* * *

Cara stands at the threshold of the _Slave_ , one foot still inside and the other on the lowered ramp. She reaches out to rest a hand on his arm and looks at his visor with furrowed brows. She doesn’t quite manage to reach his eyes, and it only makes the disconnect between them stronger.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” She asks, and Din gives a sharp nod. His fingers twitch at his side, but he restrains himself from clenching them.

She still seems to pick up on it. “Where will you go, then?” She peers closer with a dubious look, as if she knows he has nowhere else but Nevarro. But Din can’t stand the thought of stepping foot on this planet again. There are too many memories here. He doesn’t want the reminders.

“I know what I’m doing,” he says curtly. It comes out colder than he meant to, but - if it gets her off his back, he’ll take it. He can’t stand the concern, the open pity. Anything to stop the questions, the “ _are you okay?_ ” and “ _what next?_ ” as if he has any idea, either.

She’d normally push back, make him regret being rude, but she simply sighs and pulls him into a hug. He stands there, tense and unyielding, desperately holding himself together.

“My, what a touching farewell,” Gideon speaks up. He watches them with raised eyebrows and a wry, twisted smile.

“You, watch it,” Cara snaps. But the intrusion ruined the moment, and she draws away from Din. “Well, I guess this is it. You know where to find me,” she says tentatively as she searches his visor once more. It isn’t until he dips his head in goodbye that she finds what she was looking for, and something seems to settle in her. She pats his arm and tugs on Gideon’s cuffs, dragging him down the ramp.

Gideon twists in her grip to face him. “Good luck, _Mand'alor,_ ” he taunts. Cara pushes him in the back, forcing him forward again, but the gleeful smile doesn’t leave the man’s face.

Despite being led away in handcuffs, he still carries himself with an air of self-satisfaction - of _victory_. Gideon may have lost, but it came with a price. As the hollow feeling burns under his breastplate and the unfamiliar saber weighs on his belt, Din thinks maybe he lost in the end, too.

He steps back into the hold, where Fett and Shand are waiting. Shand’s sitting on a crate polishing her rifle while Fett leans against the weapons locker nonchalantly. He looks over to Din as if he’s only just noticing him - which is unlikely, but Din’s too tired to call him on it.

“Hey, Djarin, come with me,” Fett greets with a wave of his hand, beckoning Din forward. He follows without a thought. The walls pass by in a blur as they step deeper into the ship, and eventually they wind up in the cockpit. Fett slides into the pilot’s seat and pushes various buttons on the dashboard while Din hovers next to the doorway, unsure and wrong-footed.

“So you know where you want to go, now?” Fett asks. His back is to Din, and he doesn’t turn around. His helmet cuts an imposing silhouette against the viewscreen. “Hope it’s not too far. I’m not your Uber.”

Din doesn’t reply. He doesn’t know where to go, actually. Just anywhere that’s not Nevarro. Or Corvus, or Tython, or Trask, or...

When the silence draws on too long, Fett speaks again. “If you don’t have anywhere in mind...” His voice is casual as he brings up the nav systems. A few flicks of his wrist, and the screen lands on Tatooine. “You can stick with us. Wouldn’t mind an extra passenger.”

“I- why?” Din asks, dumbfounded. “Our deal is over. You don’t have to.”

“I know what it’s like for a father and son to be separated. This is the least I can do.” Fett shrugs. There’s a story there, Din can tell, but he’s too tired to try and decipher it. Fett locks the nav onto Tatooine and finally turns in his seat to face him. “ETA thirteen hours. Go get some rest, _beroya_. You look dead on your feet.”

* * *

_The verdant landscape of Tython greets him when he opens his eyes. Next, the sound of blaster fire, ships landing, his own heavy breathing and heartbeat pounding in his ears as he scrambles up the side of the mountain. The ground beneath him shakes. He’s getting close, he’s so close, he just has to reach the top - but then the Dark Troopers take to the sky, and there he can see Grogu in one’s grasp. And where once the kid had been quiet, too tired and worn out to make a noise, now all Din can hear is frightened squeals, desperate screams, terrible noises he had never heard come out of the child before._

_It rings in his ears. There’s a resounding silence, now, and it’s all he can hear. He’s on the light cruiser, alone with Gideon and Grogu who is slumped against the wall, handcuffed and unconscious. Gideon stands over the child with the Darksaber in his hand._

_“Please, he’s just a child,” Din pleads, voice cracking and unmodulated, and his helmet is off, just one more thing Gideon has taken from him, one more thing the man knows against Din’s will._

_“A foundling was in your care,” Gideon mocks, eyes wide and lips twisting in a cruel smirk. “But not anymore.” And then he brings the Darksaber closer to Grogu and a scream tears through the child and -_

_Din is kneeling before the Armorer, helmet off, and the rest of the covert is gathered behind him in a cruel imitation of that day he had returned with the Imperial beskar, when he had handed Grogu over to the Client. All around him, everyone watches his bare face, malice clear even through their blank visors._

_“Not only have you removed your helmet, but a foundling was harmed in your care,” the Armorer intones. Her voice echoes throughout the forge. “You are_ dar’manda _twice over. You have no right to the beskar you wear. This is the Way.”_

_“This is the Way,” the covert repeats, and then hands are pulling at him, peeling his_ beskar’gam _off his body, and his ears are still ringing with Grogu’s screams, and his throat is closed and choking around screams of his own_ —

Din jerks awake. The cabin is dark. It’s disorienting. It’s claustrophobic. The fabric around his neck is damp, and it takes him a moment to realize he’s crying. He takes a shuddering breath, thin and wet and painfully loud. He reaches up to unlatch his helmet, but his hands pause at the edge of the metal.

Even alone, he can’t do it. He can’t do it.

He doesn’t manage to fall asleep again.

He lies awake on the hard cot, staring up at the ceiling of the unfamiliar bed compartment and drifting in and out of consciousness. Whenever he slips too close to sleep, he gets glimpses of more nightmares, and jerks awake again.

Hours pass. Din feels worse than he felt before he slept.

A knock rings against the door of the bed compartment. He doesn’t respond, and it doesn’t open. He hears movement outside, and then Shand speaks up. “Be prepared to leave hyperspace. Fett and I will be leaving to take care of some business. Feel free to continue resting, or whatever it is you’re doing. We’ll be back soon.”

Head full of cotton, he barely registers her words, and by the time they sink in, he already hears her walking away. 

Shortly after, the ship jolts as it comes out of hyperspace. There’s some turbulence, another lurch, and then the engines shut off. In the resulting quiet, Din listens to the sound of the hatch opening and closing, leaving him alone for the first time in... almost a year, now. The strange stillness feels wrong in a way it never used to before he had met the child. The mudhorn signet on his pauldron feels branded onto his skin.

Why is he so upset, anyway? It’s not like Grogu is _dead_ \- in fact, the kid’s much safer with the Jedi than he ever was with Din. 

The Armorer had given him an ultimatum. Return the child to his own kind, or raise him as his son. The kid is with the Jedi now. Din completed his quest. _He did the right thing._ But still, that selfishness rears its head again, and he can’t help but regret that the ultimatum existed at all.

(“You’re like a father to him,” Ahsoka Tano had said that day on Corvus, when he had thought that was the last time he and the kid would be together. He’d be lying if he said her words didn’t affect him. Made him giddy and broke his heart, both at the same time.)

He had put his helmet back on. He had handed Grogu over to the Imps. He had let the kid get captured. And now he resents the fact that the kid is safe, out of danger, with others like him better equipped to take care of him. Not like Din, and the life he leads.

Selfish. All he is is _selfish._

He knows he should get up, do something productive with himself, put these thoughts out of his mind. But his limbs are made of lead, and his head is full of cotton, and he can’t bring himself to move from the cot.

He drifts in and out of waking thoughts and fleeting dreams.

The day passes on.

(Dimly, he recognizes the sound of blaster fire in the distance, but he can’t tell if it’s real or the echoes of his nightmares.)

* * *

Notifications blink in the corner of the HUD in his helmet. Din doesn’t bother opening the messaging app, but the sudden noise is enough to jerk him fully awake. He chokes back a groan as he’s suddenly aware of every different way his body hurts. 

The door to the bed compartment opens and illuminates the wall he’s facing, and he shifts to see Shand silhouetted against the lights of the hold. Din blinks away the spots in his vision to see that her hair’s in disarray, a streak of purple blood across her cheek, and she has her rifle in her hands still.

“Time to get a move on,” she says. “We have an actual place to stay now. Unless you want to camp out on the ship still?” Din shakes his head and shuffles off the cot to follow her off the ship.

The first sun must have just set recently, because only one remains above the horizon. The orange sands are cast in its dusty pink glow. Nearby is a large building embedded in the jagged rocks of a canyon. It’s constructed in the typical architectural style seen across Tatooine, all circular walls and domed roofs, and it casts long black shadows across the sand in front of it.

Shand turns around to face him, walking backward to smirk at him. “Welcome to our new place.”

Din looks between Shand and the building with mild surprise. “This?” He asks, voice rusty with disuse. What had those two been up to while he was on the ship?

She doesn’t respond, merely hums and shoots him a satisfied smile before turning back around.

(Maybe that blaster fire had been real after all...)

They enter the building through what he assumes is the main entrance - which is confirmed when he looks ahead and sees a throne in the center of the room. Fett lounges on top of it, looking like it was made for him as he scrolls through a datapad. He looks up when their shadows fall across the floor in front of him.

“This’ll be our new base of operations,” Fett says in lieu of a greeting. “You’re welcome to stay here, too. Plenty of space to go around.”

“This is... more than I expected,” Din replies. He eyes the bodies littered around at the edges of the room.

“I’m sure.” Fett’s voice betrays his amusement.

Shand steps forward, coming up to stand beside Din. “If you’re done showing off, I’ll go show him to his quarters.”

“Just make sure it’s clean,” Fett dismisses, waving them away before going back to his datapad.

She looks to Din, beckoning him to follow her with a tilt of her head. She leads him down some narrow hallways with the same blank, tan walls seen on the outside of the building. They’re marred by sporadic scorch marks from blaster shots, and the way is occasionally blocked by more limp bodies. Shand steps right over them, so Din does too, barely even registering the disturbance.

The walk is quiet, until it’s not.

“Listen, Mando,” Shand says. She doesn’t turn to look at him as he walks behind her. “I won’t pretend to understand what’s going on in your head right now. And I know you don’t want to talk about it. But we’ve got your back.” Her voice takes on a strange quality, and her shoulders hunch awkwardly, a stark contrast from her normal smooth grace. She stops at a seemingly random door before he can respond and motions to it. “This is your room.”

Din peers inside. It’s a bedroom, sparse with only standard furniture, and he’d almost think it was some sort of barracks if it wasn’t so large. There’s a single small window and an adjoining door in the corner. He looks back at her, and she nods in understanding.

“Good talk,” she says. “See you around, hopefully.” And then she’s off.

* * *

The other door turns out to be a fresher. It’s small, but to his surprise it has a functioning water shower. As tired as he is, as much as he just wants to lay back down and forget the past seventy-two hours, he has wounds he needs to dress and he’s covered in literal blood, sweat, and tears.

Meticulously, he takes off every piece of beskar adorning his body, carefully avoiding how naked and raw the absence leaves him feeling. He peels the flight suit off after, until all that remains is his helmet. His fingers shake as he fumbles with the pressure valves. He manages to undo the hatches, but his arms feel weak when he tries to lift it away.

“ _Di'kut,_ ” he mutters under his breath. He turns the shower on and stands under the cold water. The helmet trembles as the water hits it, no longer bound and kept stable by the hatches at the bottom. His hands reach up again, and the beskar is even colder.

“ _Hut'uun,_ ” he growls. He grips the edge of the metal at his jaw and tears his _buy’ce_ off. The water pounds against his head, runs in rivulets down his forehead, drips off his nose. He scrubs his face violently until he can’t stand it anymore, the cold water and open air and flesh under his fingertips. Desperately, he brings his helmet back over his head. 

The difference is immediate. His vision isn’t so bright and vibrant, the rushing water is no longer deafening, and his skin doesn’t burn and ache. The mounting panic fades away. The adrenaline leaves him feeling loose and shaky. He spends the rest of the shower in a haze.

Afterward, he finds a new flight suit laid out on the bed, a container of bacta spray lying on top with a note attached. He picks it up with still damp fingers.

_Figured you’d need a spare suit. And some bacta.  
_ _Get some rest. You still need that too.  
_ _\- Fett_

He stares at the note blankly.

Their deal had ended as soon as Din had the Moff restrained and Grogu back in his arms. He doesn’t understand what Fett and Shand are playing at. He knows they have some sort of hidden motive.

... But Shand had said they have his back, and Fett had said something about his father. Whatever agenda they have, it doesn’t feel malicious. Maybe Din can trust in that, at least.

His arms are littered with small burns and cuts from the fight with Gideon. The Darksaber had sparked against his spear and slashed through the cruiser walls, where the small metal shards caught against him. And looking down at himself now, he sees a dark purple bruise blossoming across his chest, where he had shielded Grogu against Gideon’s blaster. The memory makes his blood boil and his hands tremble. He puts it out of his mind and focuses on slathering the bacta spray wherever needed.

Once he’s done, he puts the clean suit on, wincing at how it scrapes at his skin differently. It’s made of a different material than his, stiffer and less likely to rip. It’s baggy around the waist, too short around the ankles. He finally feels settled once he attaches his armor over it, like he fits inside his skin once more, so long as he ignores the slight wrongness of the ill-fitting suit.

His own flight suit is darker in color than the new one and even darker in spots where blood has dried. The material is softer, but he can feel rougher spots where it was cut open during battle. He needs to wash it and sew the new rips closed, but the thought of staying upright any longer seems impossible. Din had just spent all day laying in the cot aboard _Slave I,_ but he had barely slept, and his eyes feel swollen and scratchy, and the bed is looking better and better the more he stares at it. He hasn’t slept in a real bed since... since Sorgan.

And _that_ thought makes his collapse inevitable.

He takes the metal ball out of his pocket and slips it into his new suit. He balls the fabric up and throws the flight suit into the bathroom sink, and stumbles onto the fitted sheets. His body aches and his head spins.

Din had left the kid with the Jedi for the same reason he almost left him on Sorgan. He isn’t capable of providing a good life for a child, especially not one with Grogu’s powers. The kid is better off with someone who can provide him stability and safety. Things Din can’t give.

“Until it is of age or reunited with its kind, you are as its father,” the Armorer had told him. And well, he’d fulfilled his quest, hadn’t he? Grogu was with his own kind now. Din isn’t his father, no matter what Ahsoka Tano had said, no matter what Cara and Mayfeld and anyone else had implied. No matter the press of the mudhorn signet on his shoulder, the durasteel knob in his pocket. It would be selfish to want to keep Grogu by his side. He did the right thing.

(But he is so, so selfish. The sharp metal still enclosing his head is a solid reminder of that.)

Sleep pulls at the edge of his conscience, and he doesn’t have the will to fight it off.

* * *

_He’s in the mess hall on Morak. Valin Hess is staring directly into his eyes, no helmet shielding Din. Mayfeld is by his side, playfully calling him “brown eyes.” The conversation sounds muted, muffled as though he’s underwater. The light is directly on him and his neck prickles, his scalp itches with the sensation of eyes upon him, of people watching him._

_“Have you ever removed your helmet?” The Armorer asks._

_“No,” he says, and the lie burns against his tongue. He’s hot and cold, sweating and freezing, hands shaking, but he needs to do this, for Grogu -_

_Who places his small hand on the edge of his helmet, and then Din bares his face again, in front of the Jedi, in front of his_ ad’ika _. And then his son is gone, in the Jedi’s arms and not his own, and all he knows is the pain in his chest and air on his face and foundlings are the future_ —

He wakes up. He doesn’t go back to sleep.

The light from the window seeps in through the shades. It brightens with first dawn, with the second dawn, burns and burns.

The bed is soft underneath him in a way that spaceship cots never are. It cradles his body even through the hard shell of his armor. He almost wishes it was harder, that it would make his joints ache.

Nothing is as it should be. He’s not on the _Crest_ , he’s not in his tiny bed compartment, and his - _the_ kid isn’t hanging in a hammock above his head. The room is quiet, and in the distance he can hear voices and shuffling movements, white noise so different from the rumbling of his ship.

He has nothing. He _is_ nothing. Without his covert, without his helmet, without his kid, who is he anymore? He has nothing left, and so he is nothing.

A clan of two - now of one. Not even a clan at all. Just one lonely man wishing things had gone differently.

Din drifts in and out of consciousness the entire day. His thoughts bleed into his dreams bleed into his thoughts. Blaster fire, Gideon’s laughter. The mess hall on Morak and the Imp’s drawl, Mayfeld’s “brown eyes.” Grogu’s screams, the Dark Troopers flying away. The Armorer’s voice, “You are a clan of two,” and “You are as its father.” The covert, “This is the Way.” His _buir_ reciting the _Resol’nare_ to him, he is _dar’manda_. There is a foundling in your care. You’re like a father to him.

His eyes burn, but tears no longer come. His head hurts, pounds in time with his heartbeat against the inner padding of his helmet. But even now, he still leaves it on.

The window dims with first dusk, and darkens with the final nightfall.

* * *

A message alert blinks at the corner of his HUD. Din doesn’t bother opening it. A few seconds or minutes or hours later, there’s a fist beating against his door.

“You alive in there?” Shand’s voice calls out.

“I’m fine,” Din rasps. The pounding stops. The door opens, revealing Shand standing in the doorway wearing her full armor.

“Have you even left at all?” She asks, leaning against the doorway and crossing her arms. Din lifts his head enough to send her a blank stare. She sighs and then approaches him. “Move your ass. We’re getting you out of here.”

“Huh?” is all he manages to get out before she grabs his arm and pulls him out of the bed. He almost falls to the floor until he realizes what’s happening and gets his legs underneath him. Once he’s steady, Shand keeps pulling him, out the room, down the hallway.

“What are you doing?” He asks again. Irritation prickles at him, but quickly fades into his background exhaustion. “I was -”

“Wallowing?” She shoots him a knowing smile over her shoulder. Her eyes flash with some unknown emotion - but then she turns back around and whatever it was he saw is gone. “Come on, we’re gonna spar.”

“But Fett told me to rest.”

“I know,” she says. “And you should. But it’s been two days and no signs of life from you. I’m not in the mood to let a man die alone in his bedroom under my roof. That’s too sad even for you, Mando.”

She brings him down a flight of stairs into a dimly lit basement. She lets go of his arm to flick something on the wall, and then the ceiling lights turn on to reveal a sparring ring consisting of a painted white circle on the floor. The walls are lined with racks of various blasters, knives, and other assorted weapons. A few chairs are scattered haphazardly around the room, centered around the circle in the middle.

She takes advantage of his distraction and drags him towards the ring.

He digs his heels in. “I _really_ don’t -”

“Think fast,” Shand says, and then punches him in the stomach. The breath leaves him at once, and then she’s kicking his legs out from underneath him. He falls down to the floor, landing heavily on his back with an audible “ _oof_.”

“Why?” He groans. “I don’t want to spar.”

“Too bad,” she replies. “We’re here and we’re sparring. Deal with it.” She reaches her hand out for him to take, and pulls him back up to his feet. “Now give me a real fight.”

Half-heartedly, Din throws a punch at her face. She easily grabs his fist and uses it to twist his arm behind him. He leans back, intending to use his weight to break her hold, but she spins out of the way. As she moves, she hooks her foot around his knee and brings him to the ground.

“Again,” she says, and pulls him upright once more.

* * *

Hours later, Din shuffles back to his room mindlessly. His body feels like one giant bruise, and his mind is numb in a combination of post-sparring haze and lack of sleep.

As he closes the door to his quarters behind him, he spots something that hadn’t been there before. A bowl of soup, still steaming, placed on the desk near the doorway.

His stomach rumbles, and the ache in his head takes on a new meaning. He hasn’t eaten more than a ration bar for several days now. Sometime before the battle on the light cruiser. It hadn’t crossed his mind, but it must’ve crossed somebody else’s.

(Shand had said they had his back. The reminder jars something in him. He doesn’t know how to feel about it. There’s a sour taste in his mouth, and a frown pulls at his lips.)

He grabs the bowl and sits down heavily in the desk chair. The movement jostles the spoon so that the cool metal hits his thumb. He looks down at it and watches the warped reflection of his helmet on its surface.

There’s no way he can fit a spoon under his helmet, not without spilling the soup. He’d need to remove it. The thought still makes his heart skip a beat, nearly makes his hunger vanish, replaced with nausea. But his head spins, and he knows he needs to eat.

Din discards the spoon, placing it on the napkin on the desk. He lifts his helmet just enough to reveal his mouth, and he sips from the edge of the bowl. The movement is so familiar - how many times had he eaten like this with Grogu in the hold of the _Razor Crest_? His chest burns with something more than the warmth of the soup. He feels like he’s splitting in two down the middle. Here he is, eating soup alone.

It’s only been, what, three days since he saw the kid? But _ka’ra_ know how long it’ll be until he sees him again, if at all. Din had sworn they’d see each other again that day on the light cruiser, but he doesn’t actually know where the kid is, or how he’d find him, or if he’s even _allowed_ to see him again. He doesn’t know if he can fulfill his promise.

He stares into the bowl, gripping the ceramic tight. His eyes sting and his heart aches.

The kid had tried to look under his helmet, last time they ate like this together. It makes him guilty in conflicting ways - that he kept his face hidden for so long, that he showed his face at all. He doesn’t know who he is anymore, what he’s doing, what the point of anything is.

He’s just sitting here, eating soup. Alone.

There’s pressure behind his eyes, and his vision blurs with tears. There’s something building in the back of his throat, and his chest is tight. But he swallows it down, blinks away the tears, takes a shaky breath. He forces himself to think about nothing but eating.

* * *

_He’s standing in the middle of the Imp hideout on Nevarro. Surrounded by Stormtroopers, and the Client sits across from him with that sick smile. Din hears a familiar whimper and looks up in time to see Grogu being led away by the doctor. The child watches Din with knowing eyes - too wise for how young he is, and in them Din can see accusation._

_“Foundlings are the future,” the Armorer tells him. The forge roars as she smelts down the beskar the Client had given him. It runs in silver rivulets like blood._

_He kneels before her, until an arm wraps around his neck and pulls him back._

_“This is Imperial beskar!” Paz growls, and he presses a blade against Din’s throat and wrenches his helmet off. The members of his tribe surround him, stare down at him where he lays on the ground, and their T-visors twist into angry shapes. The flames of the Armorer’s forge lick higher, and the beskar helmets melt and melt and drip down onto the floor, onto Din, burning his skin._

_“You were as its father.” The Armorer shakes her head sadly. “In failing your son, you have failed us all.”_

Din jolts awake. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Disoriented, he can’t figure out what woke him, until a knock sounds against the door. He swallows back the lump in his throat, breathes past his erratic heartbeat, and resolutely ignores whatever dream he had just woke up from. He’s already struggling to remember it, and he’d like to forget the rest as well.

“Come in,” he croaks.

The door opens. Fett’s helmet pokes around the side of it. “Heard that Fennec put you through the wringer,” he says.

“I’m fine.”

“Forgive me for not believing you,” Fett answers with a sardonic tilt of his helmet. He steps fully inside the room, closing the door behind him. “I know you need your time, but I hadn’t meant that you should lock yourself up in your room for days and...”

“Wallow?” Din replies dryly.

“If that’s what you call it.” He shrugs. In a smooth practiced motion, he reaches up and takes his helmet off. Din pointedly looks away.

He _knows_ that Fett doesn’t follow his Way, he knows that the removal of his _buy’ce_ is not nearly as significant as it is for Din. But it still makes his stomach roll, this show of intimacy and trust that the other man doesn’t seem to realize. And of course, his mind flashes back to Morak, and the light cruiser, and the fact that Din _does_ follow the Way and yet had still forsaken it.

“It’s what Shand said,” he supplies. His voice is flat, the mirth gone.

“She is rarely wrong about such things,” Fett chuckles, but he watches Din with sympathetic eyes. Din straightens his head, suddenly all too aware of how he had turned away. His _buy’ce_ remains and his face is covered, yet he still feels exposed.

The other man clears his throat when Din doesn’t reply. “Would you like me to bring some cleaning supplies? Surely you’ll feel better with clean armor.”

And - Fett’s right. Din’s _beskar’gam_ is still covered in scorch marks and small splatters of blood, the general grime of battle. It’s not bad enough that anyone other than a Mandalorian would notice, but it’s still _there_. Normally it’s a ritual to clean it up afterward, something sacred in wiping the beskar until it shines once more, but —

“I can’t.” His modulator does nothing to hide the way his voice shakes. _Dar’manda_ floats around his head, and he isn’t worthy of handling beskar, the metal of his people. He has already been toeing a line by continuing to wear it. Too selfish to remove it for good, yet too cowardly to embrace the transgression of keeping it. Words fail him, and all he can do is repeat, “I can’t.”

“Would you like me to help you?” Fett suggests, uncharacteristically gentle. Din’s face may be hidden, but his emotions are clear in the way he holds himself, every muscle tense.

(Din had helped him repaint his armor after Grogu had been taken. It had given Din something to do with his hands, to channel his anxiety into something productive on the way to Morak. Handling another’s armor was nothing to scoff at. It had been an honor to help Fett - maybe he wants to return the gesture.)

Din gives a sharp nod before he can regret it.

Fett slips out of the room, and Din finds that he’s grateful for the privacy as he eases himself down onto the floor. He slips his gloves off, and slowly, he removes his cuisses first, laying the large plates down in front of him. He unclips his belt where his faulds are attached and spreads it out next to the cuisses. His vambraces follow, and then the pauldrons (he rubs his gloved thumb over the outline of the mudhorn, before laying it down carefully), and then his breastplate and backplate. The process is methodical, something he has done countless times. It normally soothes him, but now it is nerve-wracking. It feels like he’s saying goodbye.

The only thing that remains is his helmet. His hands come up to the bottom edge, right under the pressure valves. He runs his fingers along the sharp line of metal, but he can’t bring himself to go any further.

The sound of the door closing alerts him to Fett’s return. Din looks up, removing his hands as though they burned him. He must look pathetic. Clad in the borrowed flight suit, vulnerable without his _beskar’gam_ , and still unable to remove his helmet.

Fett sits down on the floor across from him. He has a few cloth wipes and a bottle of cleaning solution that Din recognizes as being specifically made for beskar. The scent is familiar, bringing him memories of his covert back on Nevarro, those few days of respite he’d sometimes take between jobs. How his _buir_ had shown him how to care for his armor, back when it was brand new and awkward still on his young frame.

Wordlessly, Fett hands Din a cloth and then grabs one of the cuisses to wipe down. Din grabs the other. He sprays some of the solution onto it, and watches as the grime clears away easily, revealing the gleaming silver underneath.

(“May I ask why you keep your beskar unpainted?” Fett had asked, his _buy’ce_ in one hand and a brush dipped in red in the other. 

“I’ve got my reasons, as I’m sure you’ve got yours,” Din had replied as he painted Fett’s breastplate green. Even if he had wanted to explain, he didn’t think he could ever properly express the mixture of the day his birth parents had died for him, the day he had handed Grogu over to the Client, how both live so vividly in his mind, even now. They always will for the rest of his life.

Fett had simply nodded and left it alone.)

And suddenly, confronted with possibly one of the only other people who can understand him on this planet, Din finds his words.

“I- I took my helmet off,” he starts, voice cracking. “On Morak. On Gideon’s light cruiser.”

Fett doesn’t look up from the cuisse, but he hums in response. His face is carefully free of emotion.

The words feel like they’re being pulled out of Din. “By Creed, I am no longer Mandalorian. I am _dar’manda_. I took my helmet off in front of other living beings.” His modulated voice sounds foreign to his ears. “I should not have put it back on.”

“I must admit, I find your customs strange,” Fett says, and his eyes glance up to Din before going back to the cuisse. “But it’s not my right to judge how others practice our culture. I am not Kryze.” He places the cuisse down onto the ground, fully cleaned, and takes one of Din’s vambraces. “Do you believe me to be _dar’manda_ for taking my _buy’ce_ off? Or Kryze and Reeves?”

“Of course not,” Din says automatically. Finished with his cuisse, he grabs his right pauldron. “But you have different Ways. I know that, now. This is different. This is _me._ ”

“You are the most dedicated _Mando’ad_ I have ever met,” Fett says. “I sincerely doubt that you took it off willingly. Even now, as you believe yourself _dar’manda_ , you still can’t.”

Din shakes his head, frustration rising in him. “You don’t get it. It’s dedication, yes, but it’s also _safety_. My covert was in hiding. Secrecy is survival. Survival is our strength.” He lets out a huff of breath as he scrubs roughly at a scorch mark. Likely from his fight with Gideon, where the Darksaber had slashed against him. “By taking my helmet off, I have made myself known. A personal violation, but one that also compromises the tribe.”

“Then why did you do it?” Fett asks. His head tilts to the side with curiosity, as though he’s still wearing his own helmet.

“I took it off for Grogu - for the child,” Din says. “He is my only priority.” The mudhorn signet presses into his palm from where he’s gripping the pauldron.

“You’d forsake your Creed for the child?”

Din nods. Losing momentum now, he scrambles for words and latches onto what he knows. “Foundlings are the future,” he recites.

“Is that part of your Creed as well?” Fett hums thoughtfully.

Din nods again. His chest burns with a mixture of conflicting emotions, and he feels strangled with them all. Too many thoughts, emotions, words, and he can’t make sense of them. He feels like he’s on the edge of grasping some grand epiphany, but just can’t reach it.

“I think you should not be so quick to disparage yourself,” Fett says. “I am no arbiter. I cannot tell you what is and is not allowed by your Creed. I think only you can decide that, and such a decision should not be made lightly.”

“I’m not - I’m not some _religious zealot,_ if that’s what you’re thinking,” Din spits out, suddenly desperate to make the other man understand. “The rules used to be more relaxed. But then the Great Purge happened. We hide our faces so that the Empire can’t take what little we have left.” Another stubborn scorch mark there, and his chest tightens at the reminder of blaster fire and explosions. The red shawl of his mother as the shelter doors closed. The rumble of Imperial cruisers flying overhead, and the terrible clanking of beskar as his _vode_ were gunned down.

He scowls under his helmet. The reflection of his blank visor is visible in the metal under his hands. “Kryze doesn’t understand that. She’s never had to hide who she is to survive.”

“I am not Kryze,” Fett says again simply. The anger boiling in Din’s chest deflates. He nods and goes back to wiping the pauldron.

They finish cleaning the rest of the armor quietly. The only thing that remains is Din’s helmet, still firmly fixed to his head. With the rest of his armor now clean, the grime on it is obvious even to the untrained eye. Fett stands and nods to Din.

“I’ll leave you to tend to your _buy’ce_ ,” he says, and leaves the room. The cleaning supplies remain on the ground.

* * *

Long after Fett has left, Din stands from the ground. One by one, he deposits the armor pieces onto the bed, arranged in a haphazard attempt at neatness. He stands in front of them, strangely hesitant, before he takes the right cuisse and attaches it to his thigh. The metal sings under his fingertips. It’s rare that he doesn’t wear his gloves, and the sensation of the cool, clean metal against his skin is refreshing. Something clenches in his chest.

He attaches the left cuisse just as carefully. Then he attaches his breastplate, his backplate, his vambraces and his pauldrons. Once his armor is all on again. He reaches up to his helmet.

Slowly, he unlatches the pressure valves. And slowly, he lifts it off his head. 

He holds his _buy’ce_ in his hands and turns it to face him. His T-visor stares back at him, unflinching. The only face anyone else still alive has known him by. Other than Grogu, and Mayfeld, and — Din pushes the thoughts down viciously. His vision swims anyway, distorting the shape of his visor. His eyes are suspiciously wet.

Din takes a shaky breath and reaches out to the cleaning supplies Fett had left behind. He sprays the solution carefully over the forehead, between the cheek plates, around the earpieces. He wipes the areas down reverently, watching as the metal turns from dull gray to shiny, unpainted silver. It’s enough that he can see the silhouette of his bare head in the reflection. He carefully avoids looking directly at it and instead focuses on the smaller, harder to reach details around the visor.

By the time he’s done cleaning it, the suns have set, leaving his quarters in darkness. He brings the helmet back over his head. The pressure valves close with a satisfying hiss. For the first time since the light cruiser, it feels like it fits properly again.

* * *

His door rattles on its hinges as something knocks against it, jolting Din awake.

“Are you decent?” A voice calls out through the door. Disoriented, he can’t tell who it is. His heart races, his ears are ringing, muscles sore in a way that means he must have been tense for hours. A few vestiges of a nightmare remain - flashes in the dark, the vibration of a distant explosion beneath his feet, heat and open air and screams and the blue blue blue of the force field —

The bed is soft underneath him. The metal knob digs into his thigh. The buzzing in his head calms down as he takes a deep, steadying breath.

“Mando?” The voice speaks again, and now he can tell it’s none other than Fennec Shand. Because who else would it be.

“Yeah,” he croaks out.

He sits up in the bed as she peers around the door. He doesn’t have any time to react before she barrels in and grabs his arm. This time he manages to stay on his feet when she yanks him upright.

“Come on, Fett’s waiting,” she says. She drags him out of the room and down the hallway. Irritation sparks low in his stomach, and this time it does not go away. 

“I was asleep,” he says, voice tight.

“Were you?” She replies. The words are light and teasing, a lilting question, and yet there’s still a soft, knowing undercurrent. As if she knows what she had interrupted. His spine crawls with discomfort.

She brings him down to the sparring ring just like the other day. Although this time, Fett is sitting off to the side, sprawled out across some of the haphazard chairs. His helmet’s off and his eyes follow them as they enter. He has a bowl of popcorn on his lap.

Shand throws Din down into the circle as he’s distracted by Fett’s presence. He spins around and faces her. “I’m not in the mood,” he snaps. His hands clench and drift to his sides, but his holsters are empty.

“You never are.” Shand rolls her eyes. She lunges forward suddenly, and he’s slow to dodge. She brings a hand up to his neck and jabs her fingers into the skin there, protected only by the fabric of his borrowed flight suit.

He jerks away, ignoring the strange sensation of the pinched nerves. She doesn’t back off, though - she spins a kick out, landing a blow right below the metal of his breastplate, right in his gut. The breath is knocked out of him and he stumbles back.

“Aren’t you the best in the parsec, or something?” Shand yawns. Din dips his head, chin to his chest, and frustration boils under his skin.

She rushes forward again, but he manages to bring his vambraces up in time to block her attempt at his unprotected waist. She hisses as her fist meets the metal, but all too quickly she shifts her weight to his other side and drives her fist into the edge of his ribcage. The pain is unexpected - he loses his balance and lurches down onto one knee.

Shand hasn’t even broken a sweat. In the interlude, the room is quiet, and the subsequent crunch of popcorn draws Din’s attention away. He looks over to see Fett watching them with interest, a hand buried in the snack bowl.

“ _Damn it_ ,” Din huffs. And finally, he starts fighting back.

His mind goes carefully blank with the rush of battle. All he knows is the rush of blood through his veins, the steady beat of his heart. He gets to his feet and throws himself at Shand, and she weaves away from him, lighter on her feet. He throws a fist out, and she blocks it with a forearm before she kicks at his stomach again. But he shifts to the side and powers through it, letting it ring against the beskar of his cuisse.

He bears down on her again, and she slinks away once more. She’s running circles around him. Normally, he’s the agile one dodging around larger targets, but now _he’s_ the one weighed down by armor and being toyed with.

He slows down, and Shand takes the opening - lunging forward towards his neck once more, but this time her hand wraps entirely around his windpipe. He wheezes, but he grabs her wrist and uses it to flip her onto her back. Her grip breaks as she goes down. The relief is temporary once she seizes his ankle.

He stumbles back, unbalanced, and she kicks out at his other ankle. He falls to the ground with a heavy clank of armor. Shand quickly clambers over him, straddling his waist, reaching up towards his face —

Panic shoots through him. Blindly, he grabs her by her upper arms and heaves her away, rolling them over so that she’s on the ground and he looms over her. He brings his vambrace up to her throat.

She watches him with wide eyes and a strange mix of pride and wariness. He stares back. His breaths come in uneven bursts. His heart stutters in his chest. And reality crashes down on him when he realizes his hand is an inch away from priming the whistling birds.

( _It was just sparring. She wouldn’t take his helmet off. She wouldn’t_ —)

He hears clapping behind him and turns to see Fett sitting up straight, popcorn discarded to the side.

“Good job, Djarin,” he says. “Didn’t think you had it in you, now.”

Din recoils from Shand and stands up, clenching his fists so his trembling isn’t visible. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing at all.” Fett raises his hands apologetically. “Just trying to help you back on your feet.”

“I don’t need help,” Din says. His voice is cold and flat through his modulator. “I’m fine.”

He stalks out of the room, leaving their concerned looks behind him.

* * *

He leaves his armor on the ground as he steps into the fresher connected to his quarters. He locks the door behind him.

The borrowed flight suit chafes at his skin. He had ignored it these past few days, but now the sensation is unbearable. He peels it off and nearly kicks it away, but the light gray color is a sudden reminder that it isn’t his own suit. Right. His is still in the sink, needing to be cleaned.

Din turns the shower on and watches the water trickle down to the floor. He takes a shaky breath before reaching up to the edge of his helmet. He unlatches the pressure valves one at a time. Lifts his _buy’ce_ off, places it on the counter reverently. As he moves towards the shower, his gaze catches sight of the mirror.

There, he sees his reflection.

The man staring back at him hasn’t shaved in days. His eyes are dark and hollow, shadowed by heavy bags. His skin is washed out and pale and sickly looking. The lines around his eyes and mouth are severe.

He looks like a man who’s grieving. He looks like a man who’s lost it all.

After his shower, he hunches over the sink and scrubs at the bloodstains on his flight suit.

* * *

_“Was it worth it?” Paz asks. “A whole camtono of beskar in exchange for a child. Got yourself a new set of_ beskar’gam. _Was it worth your soul?”_

_In the reflection of Paz’s visor, Din sees himself. His unpainted beskar shines silver in the dim light, the weight of his sin heavy in the sight._

_“No,” Din whispers. “I’d give it all up for him. I would sacrifice everything for him.”_

_Paz_ \- _the Armorer_ \- _IG-11_ \- _Gideon-_ _Din reach out to his helmet, and tear it off his head. The cool air meets his face, and the unfiltered lights blind him. But then the stinging air turns into three-fingered, stubby little claws brushing against his cheek. Din closes his eyes against the sensation, and Grogu’s soft coos are all he can hear._

Din wakes up.

His flight suit is wet around his neck. He’s breathing heavily, and suddenly he just - needs his helmet _off._ He rips it away, haunted by a strange sense of déjà vu, and he gasps for air like he’s drowning. The air chills against his damp face. No tiny fingers chase it away.

“Foundlings are the future,” Din whispers. The shape of the gear shift knob presses into his leg. His shoulder burns in the shape of a mudhorn. And he knows that he would remove his helmet again and again for his child, his foundling.

( _You did the right thing,_ Cara had said.)

“Foundlings are the future,” he repeats. His head spins with the words of the Armorer, the _Resol’nare_ , Fett and Shand and Cara and all of his nightmares combined - and there in his dark quarters, Din thinks maybe... maybe he isn’t _dar’manda_ after all.

* * *

A weight beats against the door. Din jerks awake at the noise, and without thinking he reaches out and snags his helmet from where it still lays on the blankets next to him.

“I’m coming in!” Shand calls, and he only just manages to pull his helmet on before the door opens. It sits crooked on his head so he can barely see out of the visor. She doesn’t peer around this time, just sticks her arm through the gap and - throws a few objects at his head? Still groggy from sleep, he doesn’t manage to dodge in time. They bounce off his helmet with a series of metallic dings.

“What are you doing?” He grunts.

“Get yourself decent and see for yourself.” The door closes again. Alone now, he adjusts his helmet and reseals the pressure valves. Once he’s situated, he looks down at the objects spread across the bed.

“You threw a bunch of pucks at me?” He asks incredulously. The door opens again, and this time he can see Shand leaning against the doorway.

“You fought well yesterday.” She shrugs. “If you’re back on your feet, then I figured you can make yourself useful. We might as well take advantage of having a bounty hunter under our roof.” Her tone is uncaring, but she watches him carefully. He doesn’t know how to respond.

After a few too many beats of silence, she sighs and leans away. “Get cleaned up and meet us in the throne room. We’ve got some jobs for you.”

* * *

Din hates public transport.

A puck in one hand and a stack of credits in the other, he steps up the ramp onto the transport ship. The pilot watches him approach warily, and their caution doesn’t fade even when Din hands them the money and shuffles onboard.

Din settles down in one of the window seats in the middle of the ship. He feels eyes on him from everywhere at once, and yet the other passengers stay away from him as though he’s surrounded by a force field. He can’t blame them - he’s got a rifle across his lap and two blaster pistols at his hips (courtesy of Fett and Shand) and the Darksaber hilt is tucked into his belt behind his cape.

But still. The attention makes him antsy, reminds him of the safety and comfort of the _Crest_ before it was completely obliterated - and the thought makes his stomach churn with equal parts anger and anxiety. He runs a finger along the edge of the puck. For a lack of anything better to do, he turns it on and goes over the information again.

Back to bounty hunting it is, then.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Mando'a translations courtesy of mandoa.org:**  
>  _dar'manda_ : a state of not being Mandalorian - not an outsider, but one who has lost their heritage, identity, and soul  
>  _ka'ra_ : stars  
>  _Kar'ta Beskar_ : Iron Heart, the diamond shape in the middle of Mandalorian breastplates  
>  _haar'chak_ : damn it  
>  _vod_ : comrade, sibling (plural: _vode_ )  
>  _beroya_ : bounty hunter  
>  _buy'ce_ : helmet  
>  _Mando'ad_ : Mandalorian, lit. "child of Mandalore"  
>  _Su cuy'gar_ : hello, lit. "You're still alive"  
>  _Mand'alor_ : sole ruler, lit. "leader of Mandalore"  
>  _beskar'gam_ : armor  
>  _di'kut_ : idiot, useless individual, waste of space  
>  _hut'uun_ : coward - worst possible insult  
>  _ad'ika_ : son, daughter, child  
>  _buir_ : parent  
>   
>   
>   
> This installment was once again inspired by [Din's no good very bad few days with Boba and Fennec](https://oflgtfol.tumblr.com/post/638792813343129600/based-on-this-post-by-thecyndimistuff-that-i), and also now [this post](https://oflgtfol.tumblr.com/post/642479451691794432/communistkenobi-cant-stop-thinking-about)
> 
> Some thoughts about Din's headspace: so I think during chapters 14-16 in canon, he was just kind of operating on autopilot. He didn't let himself think too hard about how messed up everything was. (As I was watching chapter 14 I remember saying, how is this man not just breaking down and losing his mind, how is he so calm???) So I think he kind of buried it at the time and just focused on the mission. But now that it's over? It's all hitting him - not even just the grief of chapter 16, but also the guilt of chapter 14 and 15 are hitting him full force too, now that he has the time to really process it
> 
> Anyway, thank you all so much for the support with this series!! I haven't been able to answer all the comments on echoy'la (now part 2 because we looove writing series out of order) because I got really overwhelmed, and then school kicked in, but just know I appreciate it all so much ;_; <3


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